By William Bibbiani
Sébastien Vanicek’s Vermines — soon to be released in the United States as Infested — dwells at the intersection between two horror classics: Frank Marshall’s Arachnophobia and Joe Cornish’s Attack the Block.
It’s not as whimsical as Marshall’s cult favorite, and it’s not as exciting as Cornish’s, but it jams those pieces together into a film that eventually, slightly too late, finds its own voice. And that voice is hoarse with rage.
Kaleb (Théo Christine, Gran Turismo) lives in a rundown building with his sister, Lila (Lisa Nyarko, A Bookshop in Paris). They don’t talk to each other much since their mother died. She’s constantly renovating the place because she wants to move, he’s trying to raise money to keep their home by selling Nike shoes out of a storage locker, and his only hobby is collecting scaly critters and poisonous bugs, in the hopes of one day owning his own reptile house.
We know early on that Kaleb’s newest acquisition is a deadly, invasive species of spider. Just like we know that all the kindly neighbors with only one personality trait he knows will turn up dead later, mostly killed by [checks notes]… spiders. The motion activated hallway light only seems to exist because it, too, will be important later, just like the bag of fireworks Kaleb confiscates early on from his fellow, mischievous residents. It’s a lot of clunky setup for what is, at first, a predictable payoff.
But as Vermines charges along into monster movie territory, Vanicek’s film gradually abandons its pretense of plausibility. Good thing too, because the archetypal characters and b-movie clichés long ago undermined those ambitions. Instead, the spiders breed faster and faster, and grow larger and cartoonishly larger, to the point where the only logical response to this film is to simply run with it. Spiders don’t grow that large, they don’t grow that fast, and what the heck could they be eating anyway? There’d have to be a rainforest’s worth of bugs in this one building to beef them up that much.
Early scare scenes where Lili (Sofia Lesaffre, Le Misérables), who’s dating Kaleb’s estranged best friend Jordy (Finnegan Oldfield, Final Cut), gets trapped in the shower with a creepy crawler are almost comical as everyday overreactions to household pests. By the time the building’s few survivors have to traverse a hallway that is now, quite suddenly, so overloaded with webs that it looks like a Spirit Halloween pop-up store exploded, Vermines has officially ventured into haunted house territory.
Like many films about popular phobias, Vermines is specifically designed to terrify anyone who is afraid of its premise. So the target audience is people with arachnophobia, which is a bit ironic, since they’re the human beings who are least likely to intentionally seek this movie out. The cinematography from Alexandre Jamin (Vaincre ou mourir) is dim and grungy, with blown out lights and shadows that could be spiders and might be good old-fashioned black mold. Jamin seems to delight in finding high contrast nooks that show off just how jagged an arachnid’s legs are.
Then again, Vermines may want to terrify you with spiders, but it seems even more dead set on making them neutral parties. These spiders didn’t ask to be dropped in this building, and it sure seems like they’d like to leave, but an early, mysterious death leads the local police to quarantine the property, trapping all the vermin inside. And judging from how the police treat the protagonists, and go out of their way to keep our heroes stuck in a web of systemic social abuse — and a web of, you know, spiders — it’s clear who Sébastien Vanicek thinks the real monsters are in his monster movie.
What’s more, it becomes abundantly obvious that the film’s original title refers not just to the deadly bugs but the people they’re feasting on. The cops see Kaleb, his friends, and his spiders as barely distinguishable nuisances to be isolated, disrespected and brutalized. It’s an overwhelming atmosphere of oppression that leaves, in Vermines’ most powerful moment, all the surviving characters all screaming in helpless terror together. No heroics, no plans, just for a moment everybody totally panics because life’s futility is suffocating.
Vermines can’t help itself forever, and it eventually gives back in to familiar monster movie beats, but the second half of Sébastien Vanicek’s Arach the Block never quite lets go of the righteous fury that justifies the film’s existence. You may roll your eyes at recycled moments from more polished monster thrillers, but Vermines’ tangled web of 21st century despair is all its own.
Director: Sébastien Vanicek
Screenwriter: Florent Bernard, Sébastien Vanicek
Cast: Théo Christine, Sofia Lesaffre, Jérôme Niel, Lisa Nyarko, Finnegan Oldfield, Marie-Philomène Nga, Mahamadou Sangaré, Abdallah Monday, Ike Zacsongo-Joseph, Emmanuel Bonami, Xing Xing Cheng, Samir Nait, Malik Amraoui, Gucci, lots of spiders
Producers: Harry Tordjman
Director of photography: Alexandre Jamin
Production design: Arnaud Bouniort
Costume design: Marie-Lola Server, Marlena Hervé
Editing: Thomas Fernandez, Nassim Gordji Tehrani
Music: Douglas Cavanna
Sound: Samy Bardot, sound designer; César Mamoudy, sound editor
Production companies: WTF Films, Charades, My Box Films,
In Venice Film Festival 2023
In French
105 minutes
